


How Do You Plead?

by TaraHarkon



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Broken Bones, Character Death, Corpses, Death, Flashbacks, Gen, Graphic Description, Near Death Experiences, Original Character Death(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-10 22:54:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17435027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaraHarkon/pseuds/TaraHarkon
Summary: "You’ve spent your whole life locked in libraries and studies, learning about the world around you without ever entering it. You’re filled with jealousy of those who do. Your past sins are sloth and envy. How do you plead?"If you asked Barry Bluejeans, he would have lain a lot more sins than that at his feet. But no one asked Barry Bluejeans.





	How Do You Plead?

**You’ve spent your whole life locked in libraries and studies, learning about the world around you without ever entering it. You’re filled with jealousy of those who do. Your past sins are sloth and envy. How do you plead?**

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, Barry was leaving on a mission beyond the bounds of the planar system he had grown up in, the plane he had always lived in. Tomorrow, he would don his bright red uniform robe and board the Starblaster for a short term exploration mission. He should have been excited. This was it. This was his chance to get out there and explore, to see things that no one had ever seen before, to discover things unimaginable. And he was. Mostly. It was a nervous excitement. And now he needed to pack. Davenport had told them all to pack light, essentials only, and Barry had every intention of obeying his captain. To that end, he was digging through his bedroom to try and find a backpack he could store some of his essential travel gear in. It shouldn't be too much and really any backpack would do. 

His fingers closed around a leather strap and he pulled a battered pack out of the back of his closet. For a long moment, he stood there and just stared at it. Then an equally battered leather-bound journal fell out and Barry felt a shiver run down his spine. The bag fell from his trembling fingers and he stumbled backward with a steady chant of "no, no, no" on his lips. The back of his legs collided with his low bed and he fell, sitting hard on the edge of it.

It wouldn't be like that. Not again. It couldn't be like that. He had to do better this time. He was a scientist. He was the Science Officer. He couldn't fail them. Nothing could be like last time. But his gaze fell to the pack laying on the floor in front of his closet and he still felt cold and his chest felt tight. His breath came harder and harder and his vision grew dark and hazy around the edges. He pulled his knees up to his chest and closed his eyes tight. He had to be stronger than this. He had to do better than last time.

Twenty-five years earlier, Marlena Bluejeans hugged her son tightly and then adjusted the straps of the pack he wore. He had a sword belted at his side and a wand tucked safely in a holster that hung from his belt as well. He looked nervous and she brushed his hair back.

"You're going to do fine, Barry. Now go on. The rest of your friends are going to be waiting for you."

Barry hugged her back, closing his eyes for a moment.

"I'll be home as soon as we're done, Mom. Promise."

He pulled back and pulled on a knit cap before heading for the door. He would probably only be gone for a few days anyway. Marlena followed him and watched him go as he headed down the road. And soon enough, Barry arrived at the pub and found the rest of the group waiting in the back. Raising a hand, he headed towards them and a dragonborn leaned across the table, pushing a small woven basket of chicken wings towards him.

"Here you go, Bluejeans. Eat up and we'll get the briefing."

Barry dropped into a seat and grabbed a wing with a quick thanks. The elven man at the head of the table unrolled a map, setting stones on the corners. It showed some of the local area, specifically around an old mine that had been abandoned centuries before. The plan was simple enough. According to local stories, there was an abandoned magical artifact deep in the bottom of the mine. Blah blah blah. Typical story. The issue was the creatures known as gerblins. They weren't too much of a threat in the grand scheme of things, but in large numbers they could be a problem. And some of them had some small magical skill. But this team had been built with that in mind. Sure, none of them had a lot of experience with this sort of adventuring, but they all had a solid skillset. They had a paladin, a ranger, a thief, and, of course, Barry as their wizard. It should be a simple enough in and out, get in a few fights, grab the thing, and go.

That was decidedly not what happened.

Barry's hand shook as he held his wand at his side. They could hear stones shifting around them and knew that the gerblins were massing somewhere in the darkness just beyond the light of their torches. The paladin and the ranger were both following that movement in the dark, weapons raised, leaving Barry and the thief to stare at the wall of runic writing behind them. Barry was pouring over it, mouthing sounds to himself as he struggled to read it. He should have been able to, and he almost could. It wasn't that far off from one of the ancient dialects he'd taken an elective on once. But those slight differences meant he was struggling. 

He shifted to the left, fingers just shy of touching the inscriptions on the wall, and suddenly froze. The stone he'd stepped on and sunken into the floor. Barry's eyes widened and he reached to try and grab the thief's arm. He missed and stumbled, the shifting of the stones suddenly going quiet. And that was when the floor fell out from beneath them. The torches went out as they fell screaming into the darkness.

He came to on solid stone and that was the only reason Barry Bluejeans knew he wasn't dead. That, and the pain. He shifted slowly, trying to find his wand in the darkness. His fingers brushed against something with the same polished wood feel and he grabbed onto it. He quickly rattled off the syllables for a light spell and froze when nothing happened. Running his fingers over the wand in the dark, he quickly found the problem when sharp wood shards pricked his finger. His wand had shattered in the fall. The fact that he was pretty sure he hadn't broken anything was amazing. Then he sat up and gasped in pain. Scratch that, he'd absolutely at least cracked his ribs and he wasn't entirely sure about his right leg. Every time he tried to shift, spikes of pain shot up from his ankle through to his knee and he was afraid to touch it. He wasn't sure if it was his ankle or his shin, but something was almost definitely broken. 

So, tallying it up, he had no wand, his leg was almost definitely broken, his ribs were at least cracked, and he was in the dark. Taking a breath, he called out quietly, not wanting to alert anything else that might be down here. 

"Is... is everybody okay?"

At first, silence met his ears. Horrifying, deep silence that made his breath catch and his heart pound.

"Guys?"

The word echoed in the air and then he heard a gasp and tried to move towards it, dragging his injured leg behind him and moving as carefully as he could so as not to hurt his ribs any further. It was the dragonborn, he realized. His fingers touched scaled skin and then he found blood and torn flesh under shattered armor. The paladin was gasping for air, struggling to breathe through the blood that filled their lungs. Barry tugged his own jacket off and tried to press it to the wounds, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood. 

"Come on... come on..."

They should've been able to heal themself, he was sure of that. And yet...

And yet Barry was sitting in the darkness listening to one of his companions slowly choke to death. He tried everything he could, but he was a wizard, not a cleric, and even if he could somehow force a healing spell out of his wand, it was shattered to pieces. Tears streamed down Barry's cheeks and he went to push his glasses out of the way so he could wipe his eyes, only to discover that his glasses were gone. Slowly, the sound got quieter and quieter until the darkness around him was still. Barry pulled his knees up to his chest and cried. 

It was impossible to gauge the passage of time in the complete darkness and Barry fell asleep several times, only to wake up later and scramble in the darkness, existential dread gripping him and his heart pounding in his chest. He wished he could see. He wished he wasn't alone. He wished he wasn't surrounded by the dead.

When a light suddenly struck his eyes, Barry screamed and tried to block it out by throwing his arms up. Voices reached his ears and he shouted up at them.

"We're down here!"

It took hours. Hours for the rescuers to get to the bottom of the collapsed cave. Hours for them to find all of the bodies in the rubble. Hours for them to rig the sling and pull Barry out. Hours before he was sitting on a chair in the healer's home with a blanket around his shoulders and a bowl of stew in his hands. And only seconds after the front door opened again and Marlena Bluejeans ran in before her son was sobbing again. 

The ranger, it turned out, had survived. They had made it back to town, battered but alive, and found help. It had taken the rescue team a few days to locate them and make it through the last of the gerblins that had survived the cave in. The paladin and the thief had both died in the fall. It was a miracle, they said, that Barry had survived. A blessing from Istus herself. Privately, he was certain it was a curse. 

For a long time, Barry pulled in on himself. He barely went out, just spent his days studying and reading about the world instead of going out and seeing it for himself. It wasn't that he'd lost his curiosity. No. He still had curiosity in spades. Now he was afraid. He may have been helped out of the cave, his bones may have healed, but deep in his heart and his mind he was still sitting in the dark listening to a friend's life slowly gutter out while he was hopeless and helpless. He dreamed about it almost every night, waking himself thrashing when the candle on his nightstand finally burned out. He would lay there, breathing hard, soaked in sweat, and tangled in blankets with terrors no one around him understood and one fist jammed into his mouth to keep him from waking anyone else with his screams. He did his best to keep it all a secret, to keep his mother from knowing how much it was affecting him, but he was pretty sure she knew anyway. Mothers always knew.

He was recruited to the IPRE out of college and kept right on studying. There really was so much to learn in the world, in the planar system, and Barry was eager to learn it all. That was what had drawn Davenport's attention to him as the Starblaster project began to take shape. And that was what had led him to this moment, to sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at a leather pack on the floor while he shook.

Taking a few deep breaths, Barry forced himself to think past the terror and guilt that swirled through his mind. He could do this. This wouldn't be like last time. He was a scientist now, not an adventurer. This was a scientific mission and his job was to do research, nothing else. He'd already met the rest of the team. They were confident and capable. All he had to do was stay in the lab, do his job, and stay out of their way. This would be fine. They would be fine. This would be nothing like last time.

Deliberately, he stood and scooped his old backpack off the floor, looking at the cuts and scratches in the leather. Then he turned towards his dresser and started to shove folded pairs of jeans into it. He was Barry J Bluejeans and he was fucking going beyond the reaches of the planar system and nothing and no one could stop him. He was going to do this and it would be fine. He added his favorite studded leather belt to the bag and then a few shirts, most of them white but a few in bright red and dark blue with the IPRE logo on them. He added his spellbook and the spelled piece of crystal that would serve him as a nightlight. They would be fine and this would be nothing like last time.

He pressed his hands flat against the cold glass of the window as he watched their home plane pull away behind them, as he watched the tendrils of darkness shot through with opalescent color consumed their home. It was nothing like last time. This was so, so much worse.


End file.
